Ngukurrblog 20 October 2005:
Language and history in southeast Arnhem Land

I am reproducing below a valuable document. A clear, concise, harsh and important story linking language to history — important for whitefellas like me and maybe you too to read.

I have copy-typed this, as a mildly painful little three finger 'sorry-saying-discipline', so I hope you take the much less trouble to read this.

There are apparently still whitefellas who have difficulty saying sorry for past whitefella violence (murder, rape, dispossession), abuse, mistreatment and disrespect of indigenous Australians.

Some of these not-sorry whitefellas are in high positions, with responsibility for policy and programs to sort out the whole bloody mess made by our disgraceful past.

But if we want to really address the intractible social and health problems of indigenous peoples, we all have to come to terms with some of this history, also in the context of cultural differences such as I have begun to set out in this blog.

Health, happiness and social wellbeing arise from and depend on identity, respect and empowerment.

There is a tabloid and snipeful political focus on inadequacies in Aboriginal administration from time to time. But if you step up here onto this side of the situation, even with a pretty good pair of binoculars, you will have a lot of trouble seeing, out there on the whitefella side, many world's-best examples of how to run healthy societies.

Strengthening communities and broadening respect for them are fundamental to long term solutions to all sorts of piecemeal issues, like petrol sniffing. If you lose your culture and are stuck in poverty in a 'dry' community and can't chase smart girls in the city and pop E's to get away from the ennui, then sniffing petrol is a natural, isn't it? Shame about the permanent brain damage, but tell me about the future anyway, mister...

This comment is my responsibility, my comment, not that of the authors of the document quoted below.

Dennis Argall 20 October 2005

The following is from teaching material of the
Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Corporation
(Katherine Regional Aboriginal Language Centre)
Katherine office tel: 8971 1233, Ngukurr Annexe tel: 8975 4362
(reproduced with permission)

Languages in Ngukurr

There are nine main Aboriginal languages that people at Ngukurr identify with. These are Alawa, Marra, Ngandi, Ngalakgan, Nunggubuyu (or Wubuy), Rembarrnga, Ritharrngu, Wagilak and Warndarrang. The language that's most likely to be spoken by all Aboriginal people at Ngukurr, regardless of how well they speak a traditional language, is Kriol.

What is Kriol?

There are three terms to consider here. One is 'pidgin', another is 'creole', both of which terms are lingusitic classifications. The third term is 'Kriol' which is the name given to a particular language.

Pidgins

A pidgin is a "contact language" which arises when people who do not share a language are faced with a sudden need to communicate. The classic situations in which pidgins arise are trade or the colonisation of a native people by a dominant group.

Pidgins are only used for limited purposes, so they are simplified languages. They have a limited vocabulary, a reduced grammatical structure and a much narrower range of functions than the languages that give rise to them. Pidgins are no-one's first, or native, language, although they may be widely spoken.

Because of their limited functions, pidgins usually don't last long. They die when the original reason for communication diminishes. For example, when communities move apart or when one community learns the language of the other. Alternatively, a pidgin sometimes develops into a creole.

Creolisation

Given the right circumstances a pidgin evolves into a creole. This happens when a new generation is born and inherits the pidgin as a main means of communication.

The switch from pidgin to creole involves a major linguistic expansion – in vocabulary, grammar and 'style', all of which now have to cope with the everyday demands made upon the language by its speakers. While pidgins are by definition auxiliary languages, that is, they are no-one's first language and are learned alongside vernacular languages, creoles are vernaculars in their own right.

Inevitably, creole speakers find themselves under pressure to change their speech in the direction of the standard language from which their language derives and with which it coexists. The standard language has the status which comes with social prestige, education and wealth. The creole has no such status, its roots lying in a history of subservience and/or slavery. One consequence of this is that a continuum, or range of varieties of creole emerges, at different degrees of variation from the standard.

Kriol and the Top End

In the Top End of the Northern Territory in the last decades of the 19th century, the cattle industry and gold rushes in particular has led to the development of some pidgins to serve the communication needs of Chinese, Europeans and Aboriginal people. By 1900 these pidgins had merged into one widely understood lingua franca – Northern Territory Pidgin English.

The first place where the NT pidgin was creolised was at the Roper River Mission (now Ngukurr) after 1908.

The massacre of Aboriginal people was widespread throughout the whole of the pastoral frontier. It was particularly devastating to the Roper River people, after a London-based cattle company, the Eastern and African Cold Storage Company, in their bid to build a pastoral empire north into Arnhem Land, employed gangs to hunt out the inhabitants of the region and shoot them on sight (to which police and local authorities turned a blind eye).

This systematic campaign of extermination caused sudden and drastic social change. Normal language transmission was disrupted, fulfilling the first condition necessary for the creolisation of a language.

The second factor was the establishment of a new community – the mission – where children from eight different language groups were brought into close contact with each other with only NT pidgin and English as common languages.

In the course of their lifetimes the Roper mission children created the new language by expanding the pidgin to cater for all their communicative needs. People say this is because of the mission dormitories, where missionaries stopped children from having contact with their parents during the week, and stopped children from speaking their traditional languages. Although the missionaries discouraged 'Roper Pidgin', the language thrived, thought it was not until the 1970s that Kriol was recognised by academics.

Across the Top End, and even within the Katherine Region, linguistic and cultural diversity has seen the emergence of different varieties of Kriol. For example, people at Barunga speak a different variety if Kriol to people at Ngukurr. All the varieties of Kriol are more or less dialects of one another, so people tend to understand one another.

 

 

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